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 The crew of the Ocean Cleanup, backed by volunteers in sailboats,
ventured to areas of the "Great Pacific Garbage Patch", a swirling
mass of human-linked debris spanning hundreds of miles of open sea
where plastic outnumbers organisms by factors in the hundreds.
The debris, concentrated by circular, clockwise ocean currents
within an oblong-shaped "convergence zone", lies near the Hawaiian
Islands, about midway between Japan and the U.S. West Coast. The
trash ranges from microscopic pieces of plastic to large chunks.
Working for about a month, the group collected samples as small as a
grain of sand and as large as discarded fishing nets weighing more
than 2,000 pounds. They mapped the area, using aerial balloons and
trawling equipment to locate samples, said oceanographer Julia
Reisser.
"We did three types of surveys in 80 locations, and now we are
working on completing an up-to-date estimate of the size of the
patch, making a chart of hot spots and publishing our findings by
mid-2016," Reisser said.
"There were hundreds of times more plastics in these areas than
there were organisms," she added.
The reconnaissance trip is the brainchild of Ocean Cleanup's
21-year-old founder, Boyan Slat, and backed financially by
Salesforce.com's chief executive Marc Benioff, among other
philanthropic and crowdsourcing initiatives which brought in some
$2.2 million, according to Ocean Cleanup.
The next phase, planned for 2016, is the deployment in Japanese
coastal waters of a 2,000-meter scale model of the group's proposed
debris collection system, which researchers believe could extend for
60 miles (96 km).
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That system will contain floating stationary booms tethered to the
ocean floor and linked in a V shape intended to skim and concentrate
surface plastics floating on top of ocean currents.
Slat, a Dutch inventor who gained attention as a teenager when he
developed the floating boom system which uses technology used for
anchoring deep sea oil rigs, said the project would be situated in
international waters, away from shipping lanes.
The cost of the reconnaissance expedition and the debris collection
system was not disclosed. Critics say the system is too costly or
unlikely to function as designed.
(Reporting by Emmett Berg in San Francisco; Editing by Eric M.
Johnson and Muralikumar Anantharaman)
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